The simple answer is that the current Amazon Echo devices don’t respond to a ping – or technically an ICMP echo request. There’s a lot of waffle on the web saying this is because they’re too simple to do it, but this isn’t the case. The original Echo (at least before software updates) and the Echo Show 8” most certainly did respond to a ping, but the functionality has been dropped since then. Some people naively think that it’s a security risk, part of a doctrine known as Security Through Obscurity. As it’s easy enough to find an Echo without a ping, it’s only a slight inconvenience to a would-be attacker and a big inconvenience to an network administrator.
Most later Echos do have open ports, however, so you can check to see if it’s alive because the port will be there. I emphasise “open”, as Echos use quite a lot of ports that aren’t always open, for things like setup or communicating out. But these ports are open and can be connected to – even if the connection is refused it shows there’s something there to refuse it.
Based on my incomplete collection of Echo devices, they have the following characteristics:
| Model | Ping? | Ports |
| Original Echo | – | – |
| Echo Dot fourth Generation | – | 1080, 6543, 8888 |
| Echo Flex | – | 1080, 8888 |
| Echo Dot Second Generation | – | 1080, 8888 |
| Echo Dot Third Generation | – | 1080, 8888 |
| Echo Show 8-inch (second generation) | Y | 8009 |
| Echo Spot first Generation | – | – |
| Echo Show 5-inch | – |
So how can you reliably tell if your Amazon Echo device is alive on the network? Rather than messing around with ports, my favorite way is to send it an ethernet ARP request and see if you get a reply. I did say disabling ping was a fools solution to security.